Focus: Quentin Tarantino; Auteur in Rebellion

by: Steve Loring

Say what you will about the writing of Quentin Tarantino: it's too violent, too talky, or even (I love this one) profane. I don't buy it. Not since Orson Welles co-wrote "Citizen Kane" with Herman J. Maniewicz in 1941, has anyone so single-handedly, not to mention single-mindedly, changed the way Hollywood allows writers to tell a story. In an age of special f/x wizardry and ballooning star control, where scripts are scrapped and routinely gutted, if not generally thought of as secondary sources of enlightenment, Tarantino has reminded the industry that films, successful ones, anyway, are first created on the page, yes, *written,* then compromised and corrupted by the Wheels of the Studio Machine.

Tarantino writes in a novelistic way that irritates as many as it enthralls. His characters reside in a world where people talk more than they act and are given ample opportunities to wield verbal swords in witty, meandering word barrages. Reading Tarantino is not unlike reading a play written for the stage. The characters talk in rapid fire, listen, and talk some more. Little or no action is included between the dialogue and his scenes stretch on for more than four or five pages, particularly in his laconic beginnings, where he prepares the reader for later developments.

In other words, the breaks every rule taught to students of screenwriting the world over. If he were to write a screenwriting text, he might call it "Screenplays 101: Shove All You've Learned Up Your Proff's Ass."

Story structure is the area Tarantino really takes Hollywood to task. He simply throws it out the window. He typically employs an answers first, questions later approach, involving the reader in the aftermath of events that will be explained later. In "Reservoir Dogs," he starts with the mortally wounded Mr. Orange in the backseat of a car. Who this man is and how he got there are not fully revealed until the middle of Act II. (That is, assuming one can break up his labyrinthine plots into a simple three act structure.) The coffee shop robbery that begins "Pulp Fiction" isn't threaded to the main plot until the very end. A more conventional film would have at least hinted at some sort of connection, not to mention not killed off its protagonist sixty pages before. The just released "Jackie Brown" revisits a ladies' dressing room scene three different times, each from a different character's point of view, each giving out a different bit of vital information the previous one lacked.

"Reservoir Dogs" is perhaps his best screenplay, and definitely his most underrated, to date. It is better than the more popular "Pulp Fiction," because of its economy (anyone remember the never ending opening minutes between Jules and Vincent in the car?) and its use of shorter, sparser dialogue. Sure, it's not as ambitious as "Pulp;" it simply achieves its goals more masterfully, however relatively minor those may be. Anyway, writing a very chatty movie where ninety percent of the action takes place in the same location will always be an irretrievably insane idea in my book, and bonus points have been awarded for said insanity.

Legend has it that he once thought of cutting the now famous "commode" flashback sequence where Freddy, the undercover cop, learns how to properly tell "an amusing anecdote about a drug deal." Thankfully, somewhere down the line, he decided to put it back in. This did two wonderful things for the finished film. One, it got the viewer out of the claustrophobic confines of the warehouse. Even with dialogue as dynamic as Tarantino's, staying in the same place too long will jade even the most jaded moviegoers. Second, it properly informed the character, developing him three dimensionally. Before this scene, the reader knows almost nothing about Freddy, who along with Mr. White, is the main character of the film.

Quentin Tarantino has done something almost impossible in the six short years he has been making films. He has changed the rules. The rules of writing, the rules of what can and can't occur on the page of a produced screenplay. Films like the brilliant "The Usual Suspects" and the macabre and anarchic "Grosse Point Blank" owe the man a great debt. Six years ago they wouldn't have been made.